After traveling for nearly 4 years, we have been relying A LOT on apps to help us with our slow travel. It is actually quite hard to imagine how we would manage to plan a long trip, a 2 weeks vacation or even a getaway without them! Here are our top apps for travel that we can’t live without.
And the best part: all of them are FREE!
Table of contents
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Planning
Trip it
- When to use: Before and During
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://www.tripit.com/
- Description: Trip it is our go to application to know everything about our upcoming(& past) trips and make sure we aren’t missing a connection or getting without an accommodation on a specific leg of our multi year slow travel journey. What we love about this application is that it is very easy to use. You just need to forward your confirmation email to TripIt and the app will then organization all your travel documents for you.
- Cost: FREE (There is a PRO subscription that provides you with additional convenient features to help manage your check-in and track your flight information in real time)
Trip Advisor
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://tripadvisor.com/
- Description: Looking for a good restaurant, a great sight or something to do when arriving in a new location? Well Trip Advisor is there to help out! This is the app that has been working for us in pretty much every country we’ve been to (though Google Maps is catching up as they are now offering a ton of reviews!).
- Cost: FREE
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://getpocket.com/
- Description: You don’t have to worry about accessing a great blog post, detailed instructions on a hike or a recipe for those times you don’t have reception, wifi or phone data. Thanks to Pocket, you can save all of these precious web ressources on your phone and access them offline. This has been a real life saver app for us!
- Cost: FREE
Money
Splitwise
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://splitwise.com/
- Description: Before we started building our own budget app (Nomad Purse), we were using Splitwise extensively to track every single expense. We wrote a great in depth post on how we track our expenses using Splitwise.
- Cost: FREE (The PRO version provides you with the ability to automatically convert your expense to your local currency as well as itemizing receipts by scanning them)
Day 2 day
AccuWeather
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://www.accuweather.com/
- Description: Weather is really important when you plan a trip to the beach or a long hike in the middle of the jungle. Thanks to Accuweather, we get pretty good weather forecasts anywhere in the world. We tried many weather apps and we felt that we get much better forecast predictions with this one (especially compared with the built-in apps on our smartphones)
- Cost: FREE
Google Translate
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://translate.google.com/
- Description: Another life saving app, especially when you visit a country where you don’t speak the language. Not only can you use this app to translate anything, you can also point the app to any menu, sign or piece of text and it will translate right on your camera app. And the best part is that you can do all of this while being offline!
- Cost: FREE
Libby
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on:
Web, iOS, Android - Website: https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby
- Description: If you live in the USA and have access to a public library, you can basically borrow any books/magazines (& even movies) they might have from your phone completely FREE. The app lets you read offline which is pretty important when you want to read on a remote beach in South East Asia or after a morning meditation practice after waking up at the top of Yosemite Valley (true stories!)
- Cost: FREE
Accommodation
Airbnb
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://airbnb.com/
- Description: As homeless travelers, we’ve been using Airbnb since 2018 pretty extensively to find the best homes we can afford and this has been such a great way to slow travel the world. We’ve been using the platform so much that we’ve shared our best tips to score top deals on AirBnb.
- Cost: FREE
Communication
Google FI
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on:
Web, iOS, Android - Website: https://fi.google.com/
- Description: The first thing you might need to do when you land in a new country is to access the internet to connect with your Airbnb host or simply to order a Uber to get to your Airbnb. While wifi is usually available, they aren’t always secure. And depending on what time we land, there might not be a sim card shop open at the airport. To solve this, we’ve been using Google FI which offers a pretty affordable rate covering 200+ countries in the world (though as of the time of writing this article, some of our friends told us that their account has been suspended because they were outside of the USA for an extended period of time). Read our article about our favorite international plan options to travel overseas.
- Cost: FREE
Speedtest by Okta
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://www.speedtest.net/
- Description: Our go-to app to track how fast our internet is no matter where we are. The app is quite simple – connect on the wifi and start the measurement. We like that we can keep track of each place we’ve been to and compare. So far the fastest internet speed we’ve got was 426 MB in Download in Switzerland.
- Cost: FREE
TunnelBear
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: MacOs, Windows, iOS, Android
- Website: https://www.tunnelbear.com/
- Description: If you are looking for a good VPN that works on both laptop and mobile, look no further than TunnelBear. We mostly use VPNs when trying to access websites that are restricted only to the USA (like some of our bank accounts) so we don’t need a VPN for our entire wifi browsing. TunnelBear comes with 2.5 Gb of free VPN browsing per month which is plenty for our usage.
- Cost: FREE (The PRO plan offers unlimited VPN usage)
Social Activities
Meetup
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on:
Web, iOS, Android - Website: https://meetup.com/
- Description: Meetup is our go-to app when we are looking to see what is happening in a given city. Whether we would like to join a hiking group, a board game night or anything in between, there usually are plenty of activities in the larger cities.
- Cost: FREE
Google Maps
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://maps.google.com/
- Description: Our default application to drive or navigate within cities. We love the fact that we can download maps offline so we don’t need connectivity when driving in remote places. Plus Google Maps lets us pin our favorite restaurants, accommodation and other type of locations so we can easily find where to eat around our next Airbnb location.
- Cost: FREE
Maps.me
- When to use: During Travel
- Available on:
Web, iOS, Android - Website: https://maps.me/
- Description: While Google Maps is great for navigation while driving and within the city, it does lack when it comes to hiking, and this is where Maps.Me really shines. The quality of the maps are much greater and you can also download all of them offline, which was something they provided years before other major navigation apps.
- Cost: FREE
Strava
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://strava.com/
- Description: We love tracking our hikes, runs, swims or bike rides and brag about it with our friends and this is exactly what Strava has been designed for. The free version lets you track pretty much any type of activity and connect with your friends to see what they have been up to. We are pretty outdoorsy people so this is a great app for us to make sure we always stay active.
- Cost: FREE (The PRO subscription provides great performance tracking features if you want to bring your training to the next level)
Others
Lounge Buddy
- When to use: Before, During and After
- Available on: Web, iOS, Android
- Website: https://www.loungebuddy.com/
- Description: If you spend a lot of time at the airport, being able to stay at a lounge is amazing. Lounge Buddy lets you easily identify which lounges are available near your terminal/gate and provides some useful reviews and pictures to let you choose the best one.
- Cost: FREE
Conclusion
So there are our favorite travel apps. We have much more on our phones or laptops but we tried to really keep the size down to the ones we use the most! We hope that you will discover at least a new one you haven’t used before.
What about you? Have you used all of them already? Maybe you have others to recommend us? Please let us know as there are so many new cool apps being created everyday that I’m sure we might be missing out on some very cool or innovative ones. Also, if you think we missed some critical categories, let us know as well.
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